… things can be pretty swanky.

… and finds himself in the hangar.

A British law professor is slamming Air Canada after the airline left him asleep on a plane for 90 minutes after it landed — and he woke up in a hangar at Vancouver International Airport.

… “It’s absolute craziness,” said [Kris Lines]… who is head of sports law at Staffordshire University.

“The last thing I remember was taking off from Calgary. I knew I was safely on board and there was no further destinations and it was all good,” Mr. Lines added.

“Somebody would wake me up at the end.”

What he didn’t expect was to be roused by a mechanic after the Air Canada Jazz plane was towed into a hangar at YVR…

UD, a nervous flier, finds this story amazing. Short of being blotto (which UD never is), she cannot imagine attaining the buddhistic calm that would allow you to miss your plane’s arrival at an airport…

… at ten o’clock last night:

ALL PASSENGERS LEAVING THIS AREA
MUST CONTINUE TO EXIST

… English Masterpieces series of books
that came out in the ‘sixties.
She used them when was she was an
undergraduate at Northwestern;
and her sister-in-law, Joanna, used
them as an undergraduate at Boston
University. UD found
on the shelves in Shady Hill Square
(she’s just back from Cambridge for
Easter) this volume:

It includes a great poem by Archibald
MacLeish that she’d never seen before.

*******************************

Eleven

And summer mornings the mute child, rebellious,
Stupid, hating the words, the meanings, hating
The Think now, Think, the Oh but Think! would leave
On tiptoe the three chairs on the verandah
And crossing tree by tree the empty lawn
Push back the shed door and upon the sill
Stand pressing out the sunlight from his eyes
And enter and with outstretched fingers feel
The grindstone and behind it the bare wall
And turn and in the corner on the cool
Hard earth sit listening. And one by one,
Out of the dazzled shadow in the room
The shapes would gather, the brown plowshare, spades,
Mattocks, the polished helves of picks, a scythe
Hung from the rafters, shovels, slender tines
Glinting across the curve of sickles—shapes
Older than men were, the wise tools, the iron
Friendly with earth. And sit there quiet, breathing
The harsh dry smell of withered bulbs, the faint
Odor of dung, the silence. And outside
Beyond the half-shut door the blind leaves
And the corn moving. And at noon would come,
Up from the garden, his hard crooked hands
Gentle with earth, his knees still earth-stained, smelling
Of sun, of summer, the old gardener, like
A priest, like an interpreter, and bend
Over his baskets.

And they would not speak:
They would say nothing. And the child would sit there
Happy as though he had no name, as though
He had been no one: like a leaf, a stem,
Like a root growing—

*****************************

And is a great poetic word. And death shall have no dominion, etc., etc. You first meet it maybe in the Bible. And God spoke… and… and… See how every sentence in this poem starts with and? And why?

Why? Because the poet wants to convey the spontaneous, stream of consciousness, sudden memory trace feel of the mental and emotional moment the poem captures. It’s how we narrate, isn’t it? I remember I’d run from the porch and my books and my schoolwork and I’d run across the part of the yard that only had trees in it and I’d flee all that emptiness and abstraction for the bracing reality of the objects in the shed and I loved the way they slowly emerged from the darkness of the shed, and the way my summer-saturated eyes had to adjust to the darkness… And the way they rose from the dark world and took on a kind of super-existence… I remember that…

These were the wise tools, earth-friendly; not like my effortful cerebral exercises, my noisy verbal efforts to make the world mean something. They just were, sustaining silently on their surfaces the old truths of life. The gardener, adept in the soil and the soil’s tools, was the priest of the real world, interpreting its meanings with his gestures. I felt the real world inside myself as I sat there silently with him, felt my own plantlike stirrings and vibrancies. My sheer life – needing no name, and, like the leaves, happily blind to the convolutions of the human realm – began to twine upward into the real sunlight in that shed.

… there’s Evergreen State College in Washington, which seems to have let one of its professors run an abroad program pretty much all by himself. Which meant that he just collected money from students and put it in his personal bank account. Link (Can’t figure out how to do links properly here at the hotel):

http://www.theolympian.com/2010/03/26/1185197/ethics-probe-begun-for-ex-prof.html#ixzz0kEro8YqL

The college auditor reported in February 2009 that [Jorge] Gilbert had not accounted for at least $50,000 in student payments that he collected between 2003 and 2008 for an international program in Chile. The audit also found that he misrepresented the college by signing contracts with a Chilean company partly owned by his family.

Students who took part in Gilbert’s Chile program in 2008 reported that they deposited the approximately $3,000 for their trip into an account at West Coast Bank, for which Gilbert was the sole signer. The money did not include quarterly tuition.

The college began its investigation of the Chile program after some of the students on the 2008 trip did not get the airline tickets that they thought they had purchased. Gilbert had arranged for the students’ tickets through a travel agency that went bankrupt.

University students are young, inexperienced. And they’re not going to be at your university for long. You can take advantage of them.

You can take advantage of them because they’re unlikely to have the time or inclination to understand the workings of your school’s complex organization.

Take student fees. They’re kind of an abstraction, aren’t they? Students pay tuition, and then on top of that of course they have these fees…

But what are they for, exactly? How many universities really break down the numbers?

UD‘s grateful to Elizabeth, a reader, for alerting her to this article

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-student-funds4-2010apr04,0,2506603.story?track=rss

in the LA Times about various abuses of student fees at some public universities in California. Here’s one of three examples:

At UCLA, student fees are being used to save a plan to renovate Pauley Pavilion, home of the school’s legendary basketball team.

In 2006, administrators launched a campaign to raise $100 million from private contributors to pay for the $185-million upgrade, which includes cushier seats, a high-definition scoreboard and expanded locker rooms. But when the fundraising effort fell victim to the recession, administrators changed the finance plan to include $25 million from student fees.

“Students really weren’t involved in the process, beyond maybe some rubber-stamp committee,” said UCLA Student Regent Jesse Bernal. “I don’t think they know enough about it.”

Most of the student money, $15 million, will come from fees approved by a student referendum in 2000 to maintain two older campus buildings that house gyms and student centers. The remaining $10 million had been set aside for seismic repair of student facilities.

Using that money to renovate the arena “seems like a strange priority,” said long-time UCLA fundraiser Richard Bergman, who originally chaired the Pauley Pavilion campaign. He said he was summarily dismissed last year after complaining about several aspects of the project, including the dip into student pockets.

… Bergman said that when money got tight, administrators should have scaled back their ambitions.

Steve Olsen, UCLA’s chief operating officer, acknowledged that the referendum approving the fee included nothing about Pauley Pavilion.

… Few students will be able to afford a good view at the renovated Pauley, where seats between the baskets are expected to cost more than Lakers tickets, Berman said. Season tickets will require a one-time fee in the tens of thousands of dollars….

UD accompanied Mr UD to church in Cambridge this morning. UD is not Catholic, but she’s intrigued enough by Catholic ritual to want to see churches in action occasionally, and Easter’s the big blowout.

It was odd. As they waited in a line that snaked around St. Paul Church, protesters holding signs that said YOU’RE DOOMED TO HELL shouted at them. Then, inside the church, as the priest sermonized about Adam and Eve, a big piece of masonry suddenly crashed down from the ceiling.

It didn’t hit anybody. The priest made a joke about the building fund and everyone laughed.

Bizarre summer weather yesterday brought lightly dressed crowds to the cafés of Cambridge. As UD walked to the florist near Harvard Square, she wondered at the sunlit clarity of this usually gray city, and at the smiling milling crowds all around her, also full of wondering people.

The flower shop burst onto the street with a confusion of bulbs; no one knew what to buy. More milling. UD finally chose five huge dusty hydrangea blossoms that kept falling out of the paper the woman at the counter stapled around them. UD also bought lilacs.

“Excuse me.” A man and a woman approached UD as she crossed back into Harvard Yard. “Where’s the forest?”

“Er, the forest? You mean you’re looking for the woods? Here? … Or do you mean a shop or a restaurant called The Forest?”

“No, no. The florist.”

UD glanced at the flowers in her arms and giggled. And gave directions.

… from a Stanford student:

A real teacher engages [her] students and challenges [them] to engage with course material. A real teacher pulls from students strands of potential and forces students to use their abilities in order to grow intellectually. And at Stanford? Eh, many Stanford professors don’t teach as much as they speak at you, read off of Powerpoint slides, or boast about their various accolades. Come to Stanford and you may get a few memorable intellectual experiences. But know that they are rare and that the fast-paced quarter system makes them easy to avoid.

… for women in Belgium’s universities. For women all over the country. For the country.

Support for the ban in Belgium transcended party lines, ranging from the Greens to the far right, and also resulted in a rare show of unity between the linguistically divided halves of the country.

… for a Polish Easter. Blogging will be a bit light.

… Lady Bracknell.

The current House of Lords turns out to be a bevy of Bracknells.

***********************************

April Fool’s. I guess.

… you’re a better man than I am.

… enjoys this description of a bad book. The book is Dildo Cay, and the person describing it is Jonathan P. Eburne of Penn State.

It is so earnestly bad as to call its own existence into question… [The novel is] the product less of an unsteady hand than of a resoundingly tin ear, [with prose] so categorically graceless as to supersede camp and plunge straight into ontological confusion.

Robert Penn Warren was born there, in Guthrie, Kentucky, and the state has just put up signs on the highway north of the town telling people about it.

… “Only one person has won the Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and poetry,” the governor said of Warren [at the ceremony].

Warren was also deemed the first Poet Laureate of the United States.

“Robert Penn Warren reflected his pride of where he lived in his writing,” said Beshear. “Robert Penn Warren was proud of the place where he lived and the sign is to show him we’re proud of him.”…

Everyone knows his novel, All the King’s Men; his poetry, somewhat less known, is a series of strenuous spiritual nature lyrics. UD, though not immensely keen on Warren’s poetry, has always admired his lines’ unembarrassed intensity of emotion, their unreconstructed romanticism. Here’s a poem of his I just discovered. It has a surprising word in it.

*********************************

The Nature of a Mirror

The sky has murder in the eye, and I
Have murder in the heart, for I
Am only human.
We look at each other, the sky and I.
We understand each other, for

Is the mirror into which you stare.

******************************************

The sky has murder in the eye, and I
Have murder in the heart, for I
Am only human.

[I’ll die. I know that. The sky will survive me; the nature the sky’s part of will in fact kill me — I’m only human, only a fragile artifact of the natural world.]

We look at each other, the sky and I.
We understand each other, for

For the solstice of summer has sagged.

[The long sunlit days of summer are ending; the sky and the poet know that the poet’s days also shorten, darken.]

I stand
And wait. Virtue is rewarded, that
Is the nightmare,

[Like the blind Milton, the poet serves God even if he only stands and waits. But there’s a darker reading. The poet is full of rage when he considers how his light is spent; his impending death is night – a nightmare – and nothing else.]

and I must tell you

That soon now, even before
The change from Daylight Savings Time, the sun,
Beyond the western ridge of black-burnt pine stubs like
A snaggery of rotten shark teeth, sinks
Lower, larger, more blank, and redder than
A mother’s rage,

[Nightmare, from the Middle English, is a female demon disturbing the sleep; here, the nightmare takes shape as a burnt and rotten Mother Nature raging murderously after the poet. More blank. Nothingness gradually prevails.]

as though
F.D.R. had never run for office even, or the first vagina
Had not had the texture of dream.

[A bit of whimsy, a bit of wistfulness. The poet thinks, amid the big nothing, of the big somethings in his life: F.D.R.; his amazing initial encounter with the inside of a woman. The nothingness he feels in the face of the sky and the setting sun turns those things into nothings too. As though they never existed. What does Leopold Bloom say at his lowest? No one is anything.]

Time

Is the mirror into which you stare.